1. Discoverability

EVERY INTERACTION IS PART OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, whether you intend it to be or not.

71% of consumers prefer to discover brands through peer advocacy or online searches rather than traditional marketing - Marketing Week survey

All audiences see from brands is a social presence or emails that are disjointed from the screen they're pointing to.

Or it's click after click of the same thing, repeated, over and over.

And then we get to the onboarding or buying journey itself. That could send you into loops to get to what you need. Or raise more questions. Or make you want to punch the screen because it's telling you your password isn't valid without stating why, sending you on another wild goose chase trying to recover your account. Or worse, open another account.

Digital experiences in the modern world are maddening. Think about the last time you tried to find out something or do something online and how your blood pressure went through the roof.

This is why ChatGPT has 122.58 million daily users.

You put in what you want to know, it consolidates all the info it finds on the internet, and if it isn't right, you tell it and it goes and finds that information. The cognitive load is pretty low compared to scouring websites and apps, and even putting the query into Google.

AI isn't just being used to answer our complex questions, like a pocket librarian. It's now being used to create content and digital experiences - the one thing that needs a human touch to create meaning and connection.

So now your customers have AI slop thrown into the mix to further frustrate and confuse the experience because it lacks what is needed to make your experience stand out from the crowd: content cohesion across all touchpoints.

To counter the enshittification of digital customer experience with the first cog of Interaction Thinking, Discoverability.

It's defined as:

Discoverability is the coaction of all interactive customer-facing channels. Surfacing tailored, relevant and joined-up content where your audience to actively and passively find your brand, product, proposition or campaign, influencing them in both consideration and decision.

When you open up Google Maps, you don't just want to be told how to get from A to B, you want to know how long it will take you, what's the milage, is it hilly, where you can park, what are the shops nearby, are there points of interest on the way and what do other people think of them.

A quick trip to the garden centre might end up in discovering a cute village pub you never knew you needed in your life. Or it could result in buying a gazebo instead of geraniums.

Content journeys are no different. It is essential for every proposition, product and campaign that the content is mapped out from the starting point (trigger) to the destination (using the product). Two types of content need to be considered when planning how people go from being problem-aware to a positive outcome.

1. Active - lives and dies on digital channels. It starts with looking it up on social, through a browser (SEO, GEO and ASO) or third-party forums. This is normally the result of a trigger. They have a problem they need to solve or a question that needs answering.

2. Passive - this tends to hit the traditional marketing channels, like PPC, display, CRM, ATL, BTL, OOH, sponsorship, events, etc. This could trigger them to go into product or brand discovery or they could be unconsciously taking note of what they've seen to come back to when/if needed.

You cannot separate what people have passively seen and been exposed to through proactive marketing activity because you cannot control what people research or what an algorithm shows them.

Each digital interaction plays a huge part in the customer experience, whether it's intentional on your part or not.

It erodes trust and authority if the journey is fractured with lots of diversions, repeating sections and poor signage, resulting in an elusive destination.

Therefore, detrimental to the customer experience before they've even got to the part your UX Designers and Developers have spent time building and delivering.

Humans are hard-wired to be curious about the world around them and want to understand it.

This is biological as the temporal lobe, associated with learning, memory and emotion, releases dopamine when you feel a sense of accomplishment, growth and empowerment.

When you feel good, you're more likely to act. And you keep going back for more dopamine hits.

That's why a story doesn't start at the beginning. It starts when someone wants to hear YOUR story and actively goes about finding it.

What this means for your KPIs

We've known for ions, selling doesn't sell.

And copywriters have known since the dawn of mass consumerism, show, don't tell.

The map is old, but the landscape is new.

The days of telling people about how these brand-new vacuum cleaners suck up all the dirt from your carpet are gone. Every type of product exists, and if you're not sure, you Google it. You don't wait for a knock at the door or a well-placed billboard.

Simply having PPC banners follow people around the internet won't work due to the volume of noise on a page. And as it's not the reason they're there, they block it out. Plus, the rise of ad blockers means saying "buy headphones here" won't work anymore.

You need to tell people the story of your brand and your product by giving them something to engage with during their discovery phase with storytelling that offers meaningful:

• Guidance
• Entertainment
• Information

But let's face it, they're going to be looking at lots of brands and companies that look just like you, sound just like you and have the same story to tell. So, be different and be immersive to be memorable.

A Content Architect could help

The ownership of the end-to-end journey with a holistic content strategy designed to grab attention, build desire, and create positive outcomes and experiences.

Building a great calculator that works out the value of your home insurance is useless if no one knows it's there, so the journey needs to be looked at end-to-end, not in fragments. Here's an example:

You've found out people don't know how much the contents of their home is worth so you build a calculator, with a "get a quote" next-best-action, lots of supporting articles about the benefits of this type of insurance, other types of home related insurance products and tips on how to protect your home, plus a video on how insurance is worked out. Once it's built, you need to get people onto your website or app, so you optimise the pages for search and find a good story to tell on social media about stats on break-ins or funny home accident stories.

Discoverability is the road that links all the elements and channels, bridging the gap between digital and marketing teams. It's designed to make people think, feel and do something with cohesive storytelling at every touchpoint.

The key is to find a story the other minstrels aren't telling. Or telling it in a way that's so unique, it stops people in their tracks just to read it.

This is a key element of Interaction Thinking. If you don't nail this one, you won't crack the rest.

And that's because it all rests on:

• Triggers: the life event that started the discovery process
• Result: what your audience wants to know, feel and do
• Places: where they go to find it
• Search language: it starts with the words people typically use to describe it
• Readability: the language needed for it to resonate emotionally
• Credibility: needs Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust (EEAT)
• Format: the structure and media it's presented in

The discoverability golden egg is looking for those content opportunities that everyone is hungry for and feeding them fantastic content in a way that leaves them wanting more.

Like Line of Duty. Yes, even with that terrible ending.

People will watch, like and share your social posts if it's something they want to know, told in a way that resonates. And emails will get opened, read and clicked for the same reason.

Only 40% of websites feature on SERPs - the first results page of your search engine. So you need to make sure you're above the competition, especially if your company is an SME.

For those Content Design puritans, this even extends to services pages, for example, buying journeys, updating details, finding contact details, etc.

There may be people who know exactly what they want and where they need to go to get it but that doesn't mean they don't want to feel like they're part of a journey.

After that, SEO, GEO (the AI bit in your search engine) and ASO (the app store search engine) are just a technicality with all the bits needed for the spider and speed.

It's the same for your social media plan, you need to have the right hashtags and story that leads to an outcome and doesn't feel like a vicar in trainers.

This leads to your website or app, where you need people to easily find what they're looking for and things they don't know they need by serving the right content in the right place and making it easy to navigate to with good menus and related content.

All channels and outputs need to work together towards the same objective in different ways, irrespective of who owns the channel and their differing objectives. It should all seamlessly work together, so you achieve:

1. Efficiency in delivery, governance and resources

2. Better customer outcomes through an effective content-led customer experience

3. Advocacy by surprising and delighting customers, wherever they are.

Make amplification part of your marketing strategy

Although this sort of content has to dovetail seamlessly into your buying and logged in journeys, so should sit within the digital architecture team to ideate, strategise and create; marketing still plays a vital role in amplifying and distributing this discovery content (some call it content marketing, others editorial/blog/SEO content) in terms of putting media spend behind it and planning when and where to amplify the content.

Fantastic ideas, on-point functionality, incredible writing and unbeatable structure can only work so hard to maximise the content's reach and potential.

The whole point of Interaction Thinking is to create immersive, holistic and innovative strategies that centre conversations with customers and prospects.

Content Experience Architecture is the anchor that keeps Interaction Thinking central and stable so all the components work together to fly high, so all customers and prospects see, follow and enjoy the Content Kite.